Bast

“I am a great, yellow, stalking cat - Mesmerizer, Healer, Companion - tender and fierce, a beast of fur that blinks.
I know what I know in my body.
I hold the rat in my golden gaze.
I lick the dust from my kittens.
I am everywhere alert and at ease.
I wait in the moment, no longer flesh and fur, but the fact of a thing that waits, patient and anonymous as stone.
I am Cat: pounce, paws, and all.
I am Mau, what I call myself.
I am sun and dust, whiskers, milk and fur." - Hymn of Bast

The worship of Bast has been dated to at least the 2nd Dynasty, before the building of the Great Pyramids. Her name has existed for nearly five millennia, which makes “Bast” one of the oldest names in existence. Probably the most famous Egyptian goddess after Isis, Bast was a very popular goddess of joy, music, sensuality, and protection. As a sun goddess she defended the pharaoh and gave the people warmth and light.

The Egyptians thought that Bast protected against snakes and illness, and she was the nurse and mother to every pharaoh. In the Pyramid Texts, the king states that “My mother Bast has nursed me, she has brought me up, she protects me.” In a spell Bast is the wet nurse of Horus: “A cat has nursed you.”

Bast’s combat prowess is well attested - Seti I describes himself as “valiant in the very heart of the fray, a Bast terrible in combat.” Testimonies to Bast's protective nature can be found in the dozens of war shields with her device on them that have been unearthed in excavations. Hundreds of tiny statuettes of cats, representing Bast, have been found, worn around the neck as a protective charm. These amulets were worn in life and buried with the dead: "Bast is the first-born daughter of the Lord of All, she is your protection until day dawns."

The gentle housecat Bast and the fierce lioness Sekhmet were two sides of the same coin - in some depictions Bast can be seen holding the aegis of Sekhmet, and some statues of Sekhmet show a housecat sitting near her feet.

Prayers have been found addressed to the “good and peaceful cat,” “Lady Cat, Mistress of Heaven,” and the "beautiful and gracious cat, enduring, enduring!"

Bast was thought to be the daughter-wife of Ra or Ptah, the mother of Maahes, Khonsu, and Nefertem, and the sister of Sekhmet. She was sometimes considered to be the daughter of Isis and Osiris or Amun, and the mother-wife of Anubis or Horus.